A Massachusetts college student who was deported while attempting to travel home for Thanksgiving says an immigration officer told her that speaking with an attorney wouldn’t change anything because she was going to be removed from the country regardless.
Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, 19, a freshman at Babson College, was flown to Honduras on Nov. 22—two days after she was detained at Boston’s airport and one day after a judge ordered that she remain in the United States.
In a court filing submitted Saturday, Lopez Belloza described two nights without sleep: the first spent awake with anticipation about seeing her family, and the second after she was held with 17 other women in a cell she said was so cramped “we did not even have enough space to sleep on the floor.”
Lopez Belloza wrote that she came to the U.S. in 2014 when she was 8 and that a deportation order was issued several years later. The government has argued she missed multiple opportunities to appeal. Lopez Belloza, however, said her previous attorney told her there was no removal order.
“If I had been aware of my 2017 deportation order, I would not have traveled with my valid passport,” she wrote. “I would have dedicated significant time and effort during the past eight years to hiring an attorney who could help me resolve my immigration situation.”
The government has also argued that the judge’s Nov. 21 order blocking her removal was issued too late because, by that time, Lopez Belloza was already in Texas en route out of the country. Her attorneys dispute that claim, arguing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement made it nearly impossible to find her.
Lopez Belloza said she refused to sign a form consenting to deportation and asked to call her parents or a lawyer. She described a “tall, muscular, intimidating” ICE officer who told her “it didn’t matter if I spoke to a lawyer because I was going to be deported anyway.” She later was permitted to call her family from Massachusetts—before she knew she would be flown to Texas and then to Honduras.
In a separate filing, her lawyers accused the government of acting “in bad faith and with furtiveness,” saying the Boston-area ICE office did not answer calls, failed to update its detainee locator database, and moved Lopez Belloza without allowing her to notify her parents or legal counsel. They asked the court to set a hearing and permit her return to the U.S. so she can testify.
The filings were submitted a day after seven retired judges filed a letter supporting Lopez Belloza’s request for a hearing on whether the government should be held in contempt for violating the Nov. 21 order. The judges wrote that allowing the government to willfully ignore court orders undermines the Constitution.
